Local Invisibility, Postcolonial

Feminisms 1st ed. Edition Laura

Fantone
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/local-invisibility-postcolonial-feminisms-1st-ed-edition-
laura-fantone/
Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture

Local Invisibility,
Postcolonial Feminisms
Asian American Contemporary
Artists in California
Laura Fantone
Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture

Series Editors
Danielle Egan
St. Lawrence University
Canton, NY, USA

Patricia Clough
Graduate Centre
City University of New York
New York, NY, USA
Highlighting the work taking place at the crossroads of sociology, sexuality
studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, this
series offers a platform for scholars pushing the boundaries of gender and
sexuality studies substantively, theoretically, and stylistically. The authors
draw on insights from diverse scholarship and research in popular culture,
ethnography, history, cinema, religion, performance, new media studies,
and technoscience studies to render visible the complex manner in which
gender and sexuality intersect and can, at times, create tensions and fis-
sures between one another. Encouraging breadth in terms of both scope
and theme, the series editors seek works that explore the multifaceted
domain of gender and sexuality in a manner that challenges the taken-for-­
granted. On one hand, the series foregrounds the pleasure, pain, politics,
and aesthetics at the nexus of sexual practice and gendered expression. On
the other, it explores new sites for the expression of gender and sexuality,
the new geographies of intimacy being constituted at both the local and
global scales.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14939
 Laura Fantone

Local Invisibility,
Postcolonial
Feminisms
Asian American Contemporary
Artists in California
Laura Fantone
Gender and Women’s Studies
University of California
Berkeley, CA, USA

Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture

ISBN 978-1-137-50669-6    ISBN 978-1-137-50670-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50670-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953884

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in
any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic
adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or
hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

Cover Image © Nancy Hom

Cover design by Fatima Jamadar

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Nature America Inc.
The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.
 This book is dedicated to all the artists, activists, cultural producers,
creative workers and immaterial laborers, who keep struggling across
generations to reach visibility, not only for their own sake, but to
empower neglected communities in Asia, the Americas and across the
Pacific. I dedicate this work to the memory of Asian American artists
and activists I heard about, saw, met and recognized in their greatness
when I arrived in the Bay Area and those that have passed away since:
Al Robles, Carlos Villa, Ruth Asawa, Yuri Kochiyama and Him Mark
Lai. The generation I do not write about here, yet whose work inspired
my project, and keeps inspiring those who came after them. Asian
Americans or not, all those enjoying their bright light and powerful
words and images of these artists.
 Acknowledgements

Writing the acknowledgments for this book is a great task. It allows me to

go back in time and to recognize the efforts, conversations, events,
encounters with people, to walk through all the turns that shaped this
book—so much time and energy shared with amazing artists, col-
leagues and friends. Their intelligence is the greatest gift that went into
this book.
Time and connections are the first gifts that must be acknowledged. All
the mistakes I made in the trajectory, and the many I was able to avoid
because of my colleagues and friends’ generous feedback, also need to be
acknowledged here.
The Asian American art I am so passionate about, evolves on its own; it
does not need a book like mine to be recognized. Asian American art’s
depth, diversity and multidimensionality will be acknowledged in more
relevant arenas, soon. I hope that this aspect of Asian American culture
will become more and more central to American culture, whatever that is.
Becoming aware of its limited visibility made me immensely more
thankful for the opportunities to find out so much about it while being in
Berkeley.
Going back to the beginning of the project, my deepest gratitude goes
to Trinh T. Minh-ha, whom I encountered on a hot day in Naples, eventu-
ally leading to research visual art, gender and postcoloniality. My thanks
extend as well to Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, the few experts who
endlessly support my oscillations between Asian and American cultures
and art, never asking me to stop crossing boundaries.

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Nancy Hom and Michelle Dizon, whose work, politics and
ethics are an endless inspiration, and Cynthia Tom, whose energy and
dedication to Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA) can not
be described fully with words. I am grateful to Cynthia for her welcoming,
friendly way of opening up to me, showing such amazing trust and soli-
darity given our differences. I would like to thank Moira Roth, whose vast
knowledge of AAWAA and feminist artists of color guided me, from afar,
and, at times, in wonderful, unexpectedly present ways.
There were many AAWAA artists whose work I could not include here,
even if their words sustained my project, bringing me new insights and
energy, welcoming me after my periods of absence: Shari de Boer, Kay
Kang, XiaoJie Zheng, Shizue Siegel, Lenore Chinn, Judy Shintani, Lucy
Arai, Susan Almazol, Reiko Fuiji and Irene Wibawa. Every show organized
by AAWAA led me to articulate new questions (certainly more relevant
than the naïve ones I had prepared) inspiring insights and turning points
in my research, becoming an endless conversation I do not wish to conclude
now that the book is printed. I regret that it has taken me so long to return
something to them.
On a scholarly level, I am deeply thankful and inspired by Margo
Machida, Mark Johnson, Gordon Chang, Alexandra Chang, Elaine Kim,
Constance Lewallen and Lawrence Rinder.
I am thankful to Tiffany Lin who accompanied me to my interview
with Betty Kano and Cynthia Tom, and helped me with recording and
transcribing.
I am thankful for the BAM PFA staff’s willingness to meet and show
me some of the original works by Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha. That experi-
ence was a turning point for my entire project.
While I was affiliated with the Beatrice Bain Research Group on Gender,
I benefited from the feedback of many brilliant scholars from all over the
world: Meeta Rani Jha, Wendy Sarvasy, Anna Novakov, Lin Bin, Veronica
Saenz, Nicole Roberts, Tomomi Kinawa and the amazing filmmaker Dai
Jin Hua. I don’t know how I could have managed without the friendship
of Yun Li, Rita Alfonso and the warmth of the BBRG common room.
In the same environment, sometimes I had the opportunity to meet
Berkeley graduate students in the decolonial working group lead by Laura
Peré​z, and especially the members of the visuality and alterity working
group: Annie Fukushima, Dalida Marìa Benfield and Wanda Alarcòn.
My thanks to BBRG Staff, Gillian Edgelow, Charis Thompson, Paola
Bacchetta, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Juana Rodrìguez for their support in
the early stages. Today I wish to send my best, thankful thoughts to all
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
   ix

the University of California Berkeley faculty with whom I had the pleasure
to discuss my project; especially Mel Chen, Greg Choy, Catherine Ceniza
Choy, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Alisa Bierrìa, Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong,
Francine Masiello and Heartha Sweet Wong.
I am deeply indebted for conversations on many topics that turned out
to be relevant to this book, though sometimes I was not open to take in
their insights, because they would have changed completely the structure
of my argument (as they ended up doing anyway obliquely).
My colleagues were a constant inspiration, offering conversation, com-
fort and tips, all gifts that last still today. I am especially thinking of Harvey
Dong, Greg Choy, Ayse Agis, Jac Asher and Barbara Barnes.
For their hospitality, generosity in listening to my many rants, thinking
hard on my early drafts’ feedbacks, thanks to Barbara Epstein, Lou De
Matteis, Marta Baldocchi, Silvia Federici, Shonya Sayres, Rose Kim, Patrizia
Longo, Martin Stokes, Eddie Yuen, Robin Balliger and Marco Jacquemet.
For their illuminating insights and criticism, I am indebted to Patricia
Clough, Hosu Kim and the anonymous reviewers who believed in the proj-
ect, and led me to major rearranging of the chapters, with a mix of grace
and piercing criticism that reminded me of many women in my family.
For the patient, meticulous editing, I am grateful for the assistance I
received from three brilliant women: Kathy Wallerstein, Lisa Ruth Elliott
and Katie Lally. I must thank Palgrave’s editorial team Lani Oshima, Alexis
Nelson and Kyra Saniewski for patiently guiding me from the beginning
to the end, pushing me to move on and conclude, beyond my doubts and
fears.
A final point on location: the book was completed in Italy. I am thank-
ful to all the women in my family who support me and who will never
read this book, but still understand how important it was for me to write
it. I am grateful to all those who believed in maintaining words and
images on the same plane, all those who cross borders with courage and
inspirations.
Finally, I am grateful for my rootedness: a specific place I always go
back to, my family home’s top floor. It is a former barn, where I could
hide and write in silence for hours and enjoy the view of the sun setting on
the Alps. Grazie nonni, papi e mamma per lo spazio fisico e mentale! In this
sentence the many struggles of living between languages lie, hardly hidden
behind this book’s inevitable surface—a trace of a wound, a gap, uno
squarcio, across languages, continents, cultures, generations of women:
appreciating art, being and writing in-between.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Visuality, Gender and Asian America 1

2 Asian American Art for the People 25

3 Traces and Visions of In-Betweenness 63

4 AAWAA: Visibility, Pan-Asian Identity and the Limits

of Community 93

5 Red and Gold Washing 139

6 Opacities: Local Venues, Cosmopolitan Imaginaries 181

7 Conclusions 211

Bibliography 221

Index 233

xi
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Working Women, poster by Nancy Hom 26

Fig. 2.2 Nancy Hom and filmmaker Loni Ding at Kearny
Street Workshop, photo taken by Bob Hsiang 34
Fig. 2.3 Icons of Presence book cover, designed by artist Choppy Oshiro 37
Fig. 2.4 Chris Iijima and Nobuko Miyamoto, singing outdoors
in New York City, photo taken by Bob Hsiang
on MLK Day 1971 42
Fig. 3.1 Photo of Nothing but Ways installation by Lynn Kirby,
Trinh T. Minh-ha. Photo by Trinh T. Minh-ha 82
Fig. 3.2 Photo of L’Autre Marche installation 2006–2009
(photo taken by Trinh 2006) 84
Fig. 4.1 Cynthia Tom and Shari de Boer AAWAA’s 15th anniversary
timeline as a tree, photo by Cynthia Tom 96
Fig. 4.2 Cynthia Tom, Discards & Variances: Human Trafficking
from a Chinese Family Perspective, photo by the artist, 2015 111
Fig. 4.3 Cynthia Tom, Hom Shee Mock, 1923. Acrylic on canvas, 2008 113
Fig. 5.1 Hung Liu, Goddess of Love, Goddess of Democracy. 1989,
paint on canvas 145
Fig. 5.2 Hung Liu, Golden Lotus. Red Shoe. 1990, paint on canvas 149
Fig. 6.1 Stephanie Syjuco, MONEY FACTORY: Economic Reality Game,
Taiwan national museum, photo taken by the artist 195
Fig. 6.2 Michelle Dizon, Balikbayan Box, installation,
photo taken by the artist 200
Fig. 6.3 Michelle Dizon, Perpetual Peace, still from film frame,
photo taken by the artist 203

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Visuality, Gender

and Asian America

The persistent questioning of the insider’s and the outsider’s position in

terms of cultural politics is yet another way to work at the difficult edge
between these movements—inside out and outside in.
—Trinh T. Minh-ha, The Digital Film Event, p. 193

In 2005, I met Trinh T. Minh-ha in Naples and there I saw her films for the
first time. She presented The Fourth Dimension, as an experiment in decon-
structing Japan and exploring frames in digital art (2001). At the time
I was writing about colonialism, neo-orientalism and Japanese characters in
video games. Her visual work and writings shifted my trajectory towards
Asian Americanness, visuality, women artists and alterity. The only other
East Asian visual artists I had in mind at that time were Yoko Ono and
Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha—artists associated with highly experimental work,
centered around gender, otherness and visuality. The encounter with Trinh
T. Minh-ha changed my perspectives in deep ways, and some of the intel-
lectual and spiritual pathways where it took me are still unfolding today.
In 2007 I traveled to Berkeley to see a show at BAM-PFA (Berkeley Art
Museum) titled One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now. The occa-
sion was perfect for me because I had just started pursuing my research
interest in Asian American art, and the show’s curatorial statement promised
“a challenge to extend the category of Asian American art”:

© The Author(s) 2018 1

L. Fantone, Local Invisibility, Postcolonial Feminisms,
Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50670-2_1
2 L. FANTONE

There can be no such thing as a collective definition of the constituency

called Asian America, … but the show was born from the desire to evaluate
an Asian American sense of self, an individualism that comprises an Asian
American cultural imagination. (One Way or Another brochure, 2007)

Curators Melissa Chu, Karin Higa and Susette Min surprised me in their
oscillation between using a collective, demographic category (Asian
American) and, at the same time, emphasizing the self and individuality
within it and thus denying its validity as a ground for a commonality, an
artistic style, or a shared set of concerns and foci in Asian American artists’
work. Theirs was a question coming from the inside, serving as a response
to the perception of art on the outside.
I wondered then how one was to define Asian American art. Is it art
made by people who live in the USA but are of Asian origins? Is it art that
reflects subjects and aesthetic styles or techniques typical of specific Asian
visual art traditions? Is it art that reflects the unique concerns, topics and
styles emerging from the experience of being part of the Asian diaspora in
the USA (Machida 2008, p. 29)? Many insides and outsides are at play in
the posing of such questions.
If there was no consensus on the definition of Asian American art
among the experts, then my initial research project was pointless. In that
moment I realized that my research would have to be an interrogation of
the history and meaning of Asian American art as an evolving, contested
cultural formation. As of now, after years of research and writing, those
same questions on Asian American art remain unsettled, even among
scholars and art historians specializing in Asian America—notably,
Machida, Chang and Johnson, Higa, Kim and Mizota—all of whom rec-
ognize the increased internal diversity of Asian American communities due
to the basic demographic growth of such groups across the USA, as well
as the vast differences among cultures and countries of origin. These are
some of the many outside factors shaping an externally imposed Asian
Americanness, a collective space of artistic, cultural and demographic shifts
and internal negotiations. The complicated question that remains on the
table is, how do demographics and cultural diversity influence style, sub-
jects and the foci of Asian American artists? Why, when, and to what pur-
poses do artists chose to identify with such a cultural or demographic
label, both in the past and today? Is it to claim visibility? To search for
belonging in the larger, diverse mix of American ethnicities and cultures?
These are the background questions to my investigation.
 INTRODUCTION: VISUALITY, GENDER AND ASIAN AMERICA 3

Margo Machida, an incredibly talented art historian, ended her seminal

book Unsettled Visions (2008) by stating that Asian American art is deeply
shaped by a poetics of positionality. In surveying most of the Asian American
artists emerging in the 1990s, she pointed out that it was impossible not to
examine three reemerging themes: othering (identity and difference),
social memory and trauma, and migration and relationship to place.
Machida sees a continuity across generations of Asian American artists and,
while registering important aesthetic and subject-choice differences, she
maintains a position based on an imagined connection ever enriched by
heterogeneity. Machida develops the idea of “communities of cultural
imagination” in describing contemporary Asian American art as moving
away from the opposing traps of either embracing one’s identity while
policing its boundaries or self-erasing. She “recognizes that cultural imagin­
ation is a communicative (and community) field in which the individual
and the collective flow back and forth, a field where human consciousness
(and creativity) is an active agent of innovation of the social imaginary”
(Machida 2008, p. 278). I use Machida’s conceptual guide to analyze con-
temporary art as a complex field full of tensions, yet still a shared ground.
She does not theorize a rupture among contemporary Asian American art-
ists, because ultimately her political goal is to promote a conception of the
Asian American art community as a plurality or, as she puts it, “communi-
ties of cultural imagination,” using art to give a heterogeneous group the
power of cultural, collective imagination (Machida 2008, p. 14).
On the opposite side of the spectrum, Karin Higa, in her 2002 survey
of Asian American women artists in California, entitled “What is an
American Woman Artist?” (in Art/Women/California, 1950–2000 2002),
claims that there are no connecting elements today to justify such a cate-
gory, even as she proceeds to describe the work of five major artists of the
twentieth century. Surprised again by this simultaneous negation and affir-
mation, I followed Higa’s writing, noticing how she honors the relevance
of the Asian American movement as the origin moment without which the
cultural and artistic production called “Asian American” would not be
recognized today. Higa also justifies the need to look at gender within that
category, given women’s double exclusion from feminist Eurocentrism
and from Asian American men’s oppression.
Superficially, this may seem a simplistic criterion based on an intersec-
tion of oppressions, justifying the search for the most oppressed subject,
the subaltern who can speak, and for whom, magically, the researcher-­
translator will provide articulation of her oppression. I remained fascinated
4 L. FANTONE

by that oscillation between the present need to claim an identity and the
simultaneous recognition of diversity within it, as if the label, while used,
has become stifling and stale. As a feminist, postcolonial scholar interested
in social movements, I find this oscillation interesting to explore in com-
parison with the debates in transnational feminism concerning the use of
terms “queer,” “gay” or “feminist” as accepted and rejected by younger
generations or by non-American LGBTQI* communities.
As I was immersing myself in the literature on Asian American Women,
I was exposed to a new set of ideas and genealogical questions on Asian
American art. In Fall 2008, I saw Asian American Modern Art: Shifting
Currents, 1900–1970 at the San Francisco de Young Museum, curated by
Mark Johnson and Daniel Cornell. Chinese American historian Gordon
Chang, art professor ShiPu Wang, and curator Karin Higa, wrote intro-
ductory texts that gave a comprehensive set of views on the contribution
of artists born in the first half of the twentieth century, mostly in Asia, who
resided in the USA. Many prominent names, such as Yayoi Kusama, Yun
Gee, Isamu Noguchi, Chiura Obata, Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik were
featured in the show. From a feminist perspective, it featured few female
artists; with only nine out of sixty artists being female, they were outsiders
within the show. These artists were Miné Okubo, Miki Hayakawa, Hisako
Shimizu Hibi (married to painter George Matsaburo Hibi), Bernice Bing,
Tseng YuHo, Ruth Asawa, Kay Sekimachi and Emiko Nakano, all of them
connected to California. All the Japanese American women had experi-
enced internment.
I mention the show here because it was explicitly connecting Asian
American history with questions of representation, modernity and high
art. The show was defined by Higa as “the first comprehensive show that
examines the historical presence of artists of Asian descent in American art
[…] explicitly filtered through questions of race, identity and notions of
modernism” (Cornell and Johnson 2008, p. 15). This seems very much in
the same vein as Higa’s commentary on the One Way or Another show,
when Higa (together with Chu and Min) asks, rhetorically, what the poli-
tics of organizing a show around race could be, only to conclude its neces-
sity in the name of recovering the past of marginalized communities in the
United States (ibid., p. 17). The goal in each case is the validation of the
present communities by way of historicization, thus making the past useful
for the present. Higa demonstrates this in her language as well when she
points out that the term “Asian-American,” as one, hyphenated word, is
posthumous to most of the works and artists featured, and so the title of
the show keeps separate the terms “Asian,” “American” and “Modern.”
 INTRODUCTION: VISUALITY, GENDER AND ASIAN AMERICA 5

Reading Higa’s and ShiPu Wang’s insights led me to connect the

questions of modernity, modernism, primitivism and Eurocentrism in the
visual arts raised by cultural critics and postcolonial scholars like Kobena
Mercer, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall and Isaac Julien in the 1990s. These
scholars address questions of the politics of art museums in the West and
interrogate how the public spectacle of art plays a part in excluding from
modernity the colonial other, opening to current questions of cultural
equity. With a Gramscian approach, I took great inspiration from the
Asian American Modern Art show as a counter-hegemonic project on
modernism, cultural hybridity, and parallel and divergent modernities (to
use a term of James Clifford’s). I connect the materials presented in the
show with the critical questions posed by Kobena Mercer in his book
Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), part of the related MIT series of vol-
umes, Annotating Art Histories: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual
Art (2004–2007). Mercer registered the 1990s growth of attention in
the art world to non-Western artists and those with minority backgrounds
in the West, partly due, he argued, to the rising generation of curators
and critics of non-Western or minority backgrounds whose agenda
involved a project of inclusion and diversity. Mercer asked questions that
became crucial to my own project: Why does the contemporary so often
take precedence over the historical as the privileged focus for examining
matters of difference and identity? Does the heightened visibility of Black
and minority artists in private galleries and public museums really mean
that the historical problem of invisibility is now solved? To what extent
has the curating of non-Western materials in blockbuster exhibitions led
to displays that may actually obscure the fine art traditions of countries
that experienced colonialism? Has the very idea of inclusion now become
a double-edged sword? Could the “cosmopolitan” serve as a conceptual
tool capable of cutting through the congested, confusing condition cre-
ated by competing vocabularies—terms such as the “global,” the “inter-
national,” the “cross-cultural” and the “culturally diverse” (Mercer 2005,
p. 9)? Mercer’s pointing at modernism and its underplayed cross-cultural
past becomes helpful in exploring the contemporary in terms of a multi-
plicity of time and diverse influences. His questions continue to guide me
in fundamental ways throughout this project, expanding from classic
texts like Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979), Franz Fanon’s Black Skins
White Masks (2008/1952), Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Woman, Native, Other
(1989), Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994) and the journal
Third Text, edited by Rasheed Areen.
6 L. FANTONE

The other fundamental text that inspired this work is Fresh Talk/Daring
Gazes, Conversations on Asian American Art, published in 2003 and
edited by Margo Machida, Elaine Kim and Sharon Mizota. Machida, in
her preface to the volume, defends the project of collectively writing about
Asian American artists in a context where identity is seen as rigid and
essentialist. She warns against the conflation of attention to the cultural
specificity of minorities and cultural nationalism. She also evokes the
need to embrace cross-ethnic communications on the parallels and con-
trasts between Asian, Latino and African American artists—a need that has
not yet been met today.
In the same volume, the key essay that deeply shaped the trajectory of
my research was “Interstitial Subjects: Asian American Visual Art as a Site
for New Cultural Conversations” by Kim et al. (2003, p. 1). In fifty pages,
Kim traces all the historical evolution of Asian American art since the first
photography studio in the 1850s’ Chinatowns. She argues for Asian
American art’s distinctive and unique Americanness, criticizing the art his-
torian’s desire to identify Asian art elements in the work of Asian American
artists as the only element that would authenticate them as such. Most
importantly, Kim develops a long section about the lesser-known artists of
the 1970s who played a crucial role in starting Asian American cultural
productions—written, visual and aural—often choosing the political form
of the collective. Kim’s focus here emphasizes the historical and political
aspects of art: the 1960s and 1970s’ openness to the streets, the public
space, the crowds protesting the Vietnam War, racial segregation, and police
brutality. She makes apparent the importance of the Asian American
movement and its interconnections with Black and Brown coalitions and
liberation movements as well as the new kinds of freely accessible art cre-
ated in the streets: murals and experimental printed materials such as zines,
posters and flyers. The collective impetus of that time still resonates
strongly and in my preliminary research I discovered quite a few texts
devoted to that period, written by Asian American participants. As much
as I liked the period, I felt that its chorality would have been hard for me
to study as a total outsider, separate in time, space and identity from that
movement and moment. I listened to the female voices of women like
Nancy Hom, Nellie Wong, Genny Lim and Janice Mirikitani; read their
poems, and appreciated their addressing of women’s multiple roles, their
activist messages, and, equally of importance, their silences. Their political
side came first, always the most visible priority, and then slowly came the
discovery of the inside, the personal, marked by gender and ethnicity: the
painful silences of exile and uprootedness.
 INTRODUCTION: VISUALITY, GENDER AND ASIAN AMERICA 7

“Interstitial Subjects” also gives an interesting reading of the 1990s’

increased attention to Asian American art, offering an enlightening point
on how public museums were in a budgetary crisis when they started to
court Asian American communities for financial support (2003, p. 18).
The politics of guilt, following the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles,
also brought sudden visibility to the Korean artists in California. Kim’s
sociopolitical reading of the ups and downs of institutional interest in
Asian American art led me to analyze San Francisco museums’ cultural
policies with a critical lens, looking at processes of circulation and com-
modification of Asianness. Kim articulates her critique in connection with
Latino and Black cultural critics (Coco Fusco, Isaac Julien, Faith Ringgold
and Guillermo Gomez-Peña), denouncing the disconnect between height-
ened cultural visibility and increased exclusion of the actual, local ethnic
communities. Ultimately, Kim calls for an assessment of Asian American
art as a cultural process in which identities and aesthetics are evaluated for
their impact and influence on American art. This assessment takes into
account the artists’ belonging to a racialized group, not for superficial
multicultural diversity, but because racialization in the USA has always
meant exclusion and marginality (2003, p. 46).
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to discuss these topics with
Elaine Kim, and our conversations led me to considerable changes in the
organization of this book. On a personal note, Elaine Kim also helped me
to feel comfortable about researching Asian American art despite my out-
sider status, being neither Asian nor American. I had shared my transna-
tional feminist perspective on the artists’ work, but maintained a cautionary
distance until Elaine Kim and, in a different way, Trinh T. Minh-ha,
encouraged me to move closer to the topic. I grappled with my autobio-
graphical distance from Asian American artists and my curiosity for the
subject, as a feminist scholar interested in current “multicultural” policies
in European visual arts and the ongoing controversies on inclusivity and
diversity in key art venues in Paris, Venice and London. The cultural con-
text and social imaginaries are different, but the politics of representation
are similar in both cases, for one of the key tools used to defuse racial
­tensions and xenophobia often involves cultural policies, art museums,
immigrant communities and ethnic minorities.
As an Italian feminist trained in social, cultural and postcolonial theory,
I struggled with the ways in which research areas and academic disciplines
in the United States tend to produce divisions based on identity. The
more or less implicit assumption is that one should speak from one’s own
8 L. FANTONE

biographical standpoint and only pursue research topics where biographical,

identitarian authority can legitimize the person’s statements. For obvious
reasons, I have no pretense to be an expert on Asian American history, nor
to be an American art historian. Yet I think that intellectual curiosity
should not be thwarted to the point that academic writing should be lim-
ited to a person’s background. If research is always moved by curiosity and
academic research is formalized curiosity (as argued by Zora Neal Hurston
almost a century ago), I believe that curiosity is the sister of difference;
both depend on each other and on the desire to listen to other voices, other
stories. My scholarship can work as an effort to translate the time and
space of women’s stories, within the Benjaminian conception of the
scholar as translator, always struggling with the fear and inevitability of
betraying the original, carrying the burden of being an archivist, and a
barely visible political ally. As a sociologist and a gender scholar, I under-
stand the power I have in gathering information on and about women,
starting from facts and objects of analysis, and choosing how to arrange
them into stories I frame according to my intellectual views. In the past,
in Italy, I dedicated myself to oral history precisely because I was uncom-
fortable with the power position of the detached researcher, gathering
objective information. I tried ethnographic writing, in which my authority
as storyteller and specialized expert was supposed to be compensated by
thick descriptions and extensive rounds of feedback from the people I had
interviewed. I embraced silence for a few years, uncomfortable with how
to be the one speaking “for” and about other women and gender minori-
ties, even when moved by the best intention to spread and convey their
voices further. Ultimately, I always found, and still find, the need to speak
against power or injustice. The writings of Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989) as
well as Assia Djebar in her preface to Women of Algiers in their Apartment
(1992)1 offered me a way to discuss what I was curious about: sitting in
the corner, tiptoeing around it without speaking about it or for it through
any sense of European authority. The idea of solidarity as proximity and
vicinity is evoked both by Trinh and Djebar in their commitment to speak
“nearby,” in the vicinity, neither as an outsider looking from afar, nor as
an insider knowing it all. Trinh, while presenting images shot in Senegal,
professes with her voice off-screen:
I do not intend to speak about, just to speak nearby
Stressing the Observers’ objectivity,
Circles around the object of curiosity
Different views from different angles
 INTRODUCTION: VISUALITY, GENDER AND ASIAN AMERICA 9

Creativity and objectivity seem to run into conflict.

[…]
I am looking through a circle in a circle of looks
[…]
just to speak nearby
(Trinh 1992, p. 105)

Through these inspiring words I started to think of circularity, of writing

as a narrative relation, not just as a power relation. The horizontal posi-
tioning, so fundamental in Trinh T. Minh-ha’s poetic and cinematic work,
allows for a plurality of views and voices. It allows for knowing the self and
knowing the other, the outside-in and the inside-out, the artist and the
writers in a mutual recognition of support, and for a loss of control.

In writing close to the other of the other, I can only choose to maintain self-­
reflexively a critical relationship towards the material, a relationship that
defines both the subject written and the writing subject, undoing the I while
asking what do I want wanting to know you or me? (Trinh 1989, p. 79)

Following Trinh’s ethical and aesthetic positions, dwelling in the readings

she gave me, and sitting in her classes at Berkeley deeply shaped my
thoughts on the current project, in ways I cannot fully express in words.
Her invitation to be inside/outside, neither one nor the other, gave me
the freedom to shift across different artists, speaking nearby their work
and life trajectories. Most importantly, it brought a new dimension to my
original commitment to female stories that were personal and biographi-
cal, moving at a different level than the great narratives presented by
the Western social sciences. The memories of Asian American women art-
ists of the 1970s and 1980s generations became a core part of my research,
bringing me back to my original passion for oral history, yet with a new
understanding of the circularity and shared repetition of such stories, told
in the vicinity of the ethics of “speaking nearby.”
In December 2008 I started following the activities of the Asian
American Women Artists’ Association (AAWAA), moved by the idea of
looking at art produced by women collectively, or at least art produced
within a female community. I went to their meetings and volunteered for
their art show preparation. I attended their panel discussion at the de Young
Museum in San Francisco, titled AsianAMERICANArt: Re-Framing
the Genre. In January 2009 I saw their Artists-in-Residence show at the
de Young Museum, featuring ten AAWAA artists. In these high-profile
10 L. FANTONE

events I registered a certain “identity fatigue” expressed by younger Asian

American artists, which was an eye-opener for me—a novel articulation of
rejection for the superficiality of cultural policies aimed at minority com-
munities, otherwise kept at the margin of fundamental economic processes.
In this light, I interpreted the series of workshops self-­organized by the
AAWAA as a rejection of creative cages, attempting to limit market-driven
impositions on Asian American female artists. The AAWAA’s board mem-
bers took a decision to follow their internal pathways and to create deeply
biographical art unconstrained by external trends. These women were find-
ing energy from their fire within.
This is not dissimilar to what the artists and curators of the One Way or
Another show discussed in the show’s opening statement. Born in the
1970s and 1980s, they chose to distance themselves from the hyphenated
ethnic identity that so often led to creative constraints, including a pres-
sure to present their work as always consistent with the expectations of
said identity, seen as a fundamentally demographic or racial category and
imposed upon them by the dominant US population in its institutions and
daily interactions. Such expectations went hand in hand with Orientalist
exoticism in the worst cases and, even in the best cases, limited their art to
some reference to Asianness. Rebelling against both, they claimed the
right to opacity, the right to create art unrelated to their origins, the right
to reference California’s everydayness, and to work on global issues, in the
present and future, without necessarily referencing their ancestry and
biographies.
In 2010, in Berkeley, I spent many hours sitting in a room where I
could look directly, in person, at Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha’s original work,
and taking classes at the University of California on Asian American his-
tory, film and art. I was first opening myself to the outside, to the large
picture, and then zooming into the intimacy and materiality of the
­exquisite objects produced by Cha. As a diseuse, Cha lends her voice to
many women, yet when you try to trace her steps she leaves the frame,
hardly visible (Cha 1981, p. 114).
As I read Cha’s interviews and her poetic prose, I further developed my
transnational feminist and postcolonial critical lenses2 and decided to focus
on contemporary Asian American female artists in California, active from
the 1970s onward.
These seemed sufficient grounds on which to define a group of artists,
because their art and its reception was connected to questions of minori-
tization, internal and societal oppression, and gender discrimination.
 INTRODUCTION: VISUALITY, GENDER AND ASIAN AMERICA 11

Moreover, their art was aimed at creating a feminist community across

identities. Using an intersectional, transnational feminist standpoint to
write about women artists was possible, as attested by the rich and influ-
ential volume Talking Visions, published in 1998 by Ella Shoah in collabo-
ration with Coco Fusco and Marcia Tucker of the New Museum of
New York. While its premises about claiming multiculturalism as a
term seem today too optimistic, the idea of crossing multiple boundaries
and embracing a multiplicity of female scholars and artists in dialogue,
across their differences, still holds great importance. Particularly valuable
is the fact that the images and written texts have equal weight, and that the
volume ambitiously crosses many canons and debates that are still peri-
odized as belonging to different eras. In more than five hundred pages, it
covers race and queer theories, anti-colonial and postcolonial critiques,
aiming to undo any stable binary (Shohat 1998, p. 4). I draw inspiration
from Shohat’s critical analysis of the interconnectedness of third-word
struggles and transnational feminisms, especially when she cautions against
the fetishization of the “revolutionary moment” by later generations.
Resistance is not black and white, but rather multiple and fragmented.
Feminist scholarship can thus be based in polycentric approaches
(ibid., 22). Talking Vision continues to be an inspiration to think with art,
resisting the separation of feminist research and theories from visual repre-
sentations, and it has changed my way of doing feminist work by thinking
with images of non-Western, female artists.

Contours of the Research

My book fundamentally connects Asian immigration, gender and art, reg-
istering the recurring forms of Orientalism in contemporary art, thus con-
firming much of the findings in the existing literature, and, most importantly,
drawing temporal and spatial continuities that have been buried under the
implicit narratives of local, identity-based art exhibitions. My research fol-
lows some of the literature used in Asian American studies since, as Susan
Koshy has noted, it “regards a political subject formulation that makes vis-
ible a history of exclusion and discrimination against Asian immigrants”
(2004, p. 17). Various publications in the field of Asian cultural studies have
opened a transnational space of cultural analysis in the last decade: Shu Mei
Shih’s Visuality and Identity (2007), Peter Feng’s Identities in Motion
(2002), and Gina Marchetti’s Romance and the Yellow Peril (1993), all
offer interesting tools and politically multifaceted positions, though their
12 L. FANTONE

main focus is on film and popular media. This book borrows some of their
tools to look at the framing of high art as a transnational discourse and
takes the freedom to move between a theoretical level, a global, political
analysis, and a critique of specific local artists. It looks at art and culture in
response to Orientalist gender and racial stereotypes in order to define
hegemonic culture and spaces of resistance and creativity. I borrow the
tools of postcolonial theory to outline the persistence of forms of Orientalism
and the more or less subtle ways in which it keeps returning. I examine art
politically, as a cultural formation where claims of belonging and exclusions
take place.
This book fundamentally connects Asian immigration, gender and art,
registering the recurring forms of orientalism3 in contemporary art. It
thus confirms much of the findings in the existing literature while choos-
ing a more recent timeframe than that in the texts mentioned above and
most importantly, draws temporal and spatial continuities that have been
buried under the implicit narratives of local, identity-based art exhibi-
tions. My research follows some of the literature used in Asian American
studies since, as Susan Koshy noted, it “regards a political subject formu-
lation that makes visible a history of exclusion and discrimination against
Asian immigrants” (Koshy 2004, p. 13). Various publications in the field
of Asian cultural studies have opened a transnational space of cultural
analysis in the last decade: Shu Mei Shih’s Visuality and Identity (2007),
Peter Feng’s Identities in Motion (2002) and Roger Garcia’s Out of the
Shadows (2001) offer interesting tools and politically multifaceted posi-
tions, though their main focus is on film and popular media. My book
borrows some of their tools to look at the framing of high art and to cri-
tique specific local artists.
This book covers contemporary art from the 1970s to the present,
moving in dialogue with three specific temporal nodes: the political legacy
of 1970s’ Asian American art in the United States, feminist art and the
emergence of a transnational feminist standpoint in the 1990s; and, the
contemporary East Asian/Pacific Rim networks of cultural and artistic
production. The main argument develops along two lines. On the one
hand I compare the 1990s’ celebration of ethnic identity, within the multi­
culturalist frame of cultural policies, with the Asian American movement
of the late 1960s, in which art and politics were deeply intertwined. On
the other hand, I aim to problematize the “global” and the Chinese “art
boom” as buzzwords that reconfigure East–West discourses on contem-
porary art. The book intervenes in the contemporary shift of attention to
 INTRODUCTION: VISUALITY, GENDER AND ASIAN AMERICA 13

Chinese art, as a key locus where questions of value and cosmopolitanism

emerge. Looking at the opportunities of visibility and ghettoization for
such artists in three different moments (1970s, late 1980s/1990s and
2000s), two distinct questions shape my research: What spaces were avail-
able for diasporic female artists in the 1970s and 1980s, and how do
California-based Asian artists relate to today’s new attention to Chinese
art in the cultural arena? Furthermore, what differences, opportunities
and closures emerge for Asian American, female-identified artists in the
2000s? Do gender and ethnicity offer a pathway to connect Asian dia-
sporic female artists to contemporary art institutions in California? I argue
that the relatively “low visibility” of Asian American art has gendered
dimensions. With these questions in mind, I look at the intersection of art,
gender and Asianness as generative of a panoply of multilayered discourses.
Asianness here becomes a critical category to contrast historical forms of
orientalism reproduced in art. Seen together with gender, it offers the
opportunity to critique a persistent stereotype of the silent, obedient,
model-minority Asian female. The next step is to ask, how does it apply to
the artist? If art is often perceived as the realm of rebellion or the freedom
from controlling images, we must ask an established feminist art question,
translating it in intersectional terms: What is art for the female artist?
Moreover, how is the female artist perceived by the public? By curators
and critics? It is crucial for this project to move past registering the simple
predominance of male artists, offering an intersectional perspective.
Registering the low visibility of Asian American artists, I shine light on
an under-attended group of postcolonial, female-identified artists in
California; their unique methods, politics, poetics and aesthetics; and their
pioneering and embracing of visual art as a form of resistance against racial
and gender stereotypes. Their politics of refusal to fit into orientalist tropes
are varied and worthy of a close reading, which I will carry out for each
artist at the beginning of each subsequent chapter of the book. I ultimately
argue that affiliations with East Asia—China, especially—are becoming an
asset to artists, while their belonging to an American ethnic and gender
minority is losing ground. Looking at the last decade, no one can ignore
the ongoing historical shift rooted in the emergence of China as a global
power, nor how this economic and political change is reflected in the art
and cultural spheres (see Zhang 1997), reorienting the axis of identifica-
tion and marginality of Asian American communities vis-à-vis American
hegemonic culture. In the new scenario, affiliation with East Asia is
becoming an asset for artists in terms of visibility and marketability.
14 L. FANTONE

Lisa Lowe was likewise a crucial inspiration with regards to Asian

Americanness in defining the modern as a non-universal term with a spe-
cific geohistorical connotation. The modern is connected to progress and
development, clearly originating in the West even when it cannot be
thought of without encounters with other spaces and people. Lowe con-
trasts the Western with the contemporary radical reworkings of Asian
identities globally (1996, p. xxii). The Asian bourgeoisie becomes migrant
in the West. Such a social constituency finds itself fitting in the “minority
discourse” in the United States and also part of a narrative detailing the
consolidation of transnationalism. I will use Lowe’s point and elaborate on
such connections in what I define as “red and gold washing.” While my
project maintains a local focus, within California, it engages with ques-
tions of globalization, migration, gender and the temporalities of postco-
lonialism. Applying a transnational, postcolonial feminist approach, my
project also tackles questions of absence and presence of the gendered and
ethnically marked bodies of artists in the art space.

Questions of Location
Some of the artists I have interviewed since 2009 are first-generation
immigrants who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s, while other artists were
born in America (as first, half or second generation). Still others are fourth
generation, having grown up in families of Chinese and Japanese origin,
and who have also been deeply imbued with multiple aspects of Californian
culture. I talked with contemporary artists Betty Kano, Nancy Hom,
Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cynthia Tom, asking about their aesthetic choices,
the biographical experiences that determined their need to create a com-
munity and their opinions on the relevance of that collectivity in the new
millennium.
In my interviews, I focus on the interrelated questions of art, value and
work in various ways by focusing on the work of art as valued or devalued
in the Californian, Asian-immigrant community; the political work and
activism the artist performs for the Asian community; the limited mone-
tary value of the work of art produced by Asian female-identified artists in
America; and finally, the transformative value of such art, against oriental-
ist expectations. I argue that this group of female-identified, contemporary
artists of Asian descent in California are transforming the predomi-
nantly orientalist images still circulating in middle and high-brow art
institutions today, by either rejecting an exoticized use of their ethnic
 INTRODUCTION: VISUALITY, GENDER AND ASIAN AMERICA 15

background, or, when not born in the United States, refusing to tie their
work solely to their country of origin.
The stories of the postcolonial female artists I have chosen call into
question ethnic identifications and suggest far more interesting trajecto-
ries than the entrenchment in the multicultural ghettoes and identity poli-
tics that was so typically embraced in the 1990s. Therefore, if the central
subjects of this book are contemporary female visual artists of Asian
descent in California, this book is not strictly about Asian American iden-
tity. I use the umbrella term consciously, not to suggest a cohesive unity
but, rather, to reference an external label often imposed on the artists
through continuing social processes of becoming other, yet always already
American.
Throughout the book, I follow the artists’ ongoing attempts to gain
visibility and to create artistic connections based on identification and
mutual support within the Asian American diaspora in the San Francisco
Bay Area. I have chosen to analyze artwork that challenges the persistent
stereotypical images of Asian American femininities as passive and “orien-
tal.” I look at the specific cultural milieu, where transnational, intergenera-
tional and gender connections have flourished, demonstrating a unique
case of translation and a postcolonial crossing of East Asian and American
West Coast cultures. I argue that the artwork reflects a political and aes-
thetic urgency and a constant weaving of identities and languages, dislo-
cating many binaries and stable forms (centers and peripheries, male and
female, written and visual canons). The interview transcripts highlight the
fact that these contemporary artists present a complex positioning that
fluctuates through a poetic space without sacrificing a sense of rootedness
in their political community. I ask about their aesthetic choices, factors
that have determined their need to create a community and their opinions
on the relevance of that collectivity in the new millennium.

Why California?
This book focuses on California because of the unique role that the West
Coast has played as a primary destination for Asian (especially Chinese and
Japanese) immigrants since the nineteenth century, and for many other
East and South Asian groups in the twentieth century. California is a
highly relevant place for the development of Asian American communities
and cultural formations over the last two centuries.
16 L. FANTONE

Despite various waves of discriminatory laws, Chinese and Japanese

communities have been able to develop a strong culture and a fertile
ground for artists to find inspiration and subjects. California, along with
the state of Washington, is also an area where Asian art, culture and their
continuity with the local Asian American communities have become the
most publicly recognized in political and cultural spheres. With the influx
of Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese and Laotians, such spheres continue to
grow and take on new dimensions. The accumulation of history, memory,
art forms, languages and family traditions in California provides a rich
backdrop to the artistic endeavors of contemporary Asian American art-
ists. Thus, the work of contemporary artists who reside in California will
likewise offer critiques of traditions and of dominant images, configuring
unexpected intersections of class, gender and race in American culture.
Apart from the historical and epistemological dimensions, there are two
more reasons why I focus on these contemporary California-based artists.
First, many left-leaning curators and artists in California, and especially in
the Bay Area, typically see themselves as politicized and attentive to issues
of “diversity,” and are prone to espousing simplified “multicultural” lib-
eral narratives emerging from, and perhaps fixed to, the 1970s. I unpack
this issue throughout the book by examining the different political posi-
tions among the female artists interviewed, and make note of who chooses
to mobilize ethnic identity as well as when and why some artists reject
these tropes entirely. Second, the role of California in relation to the
Pacific Rim and the discourse of the “global” in its local interactions are
also key components to my argument. California and the West Coast more
broadly will continue to play a strong role in terms of US cultural politics
toward Asia, perhaps in the contradictory ways that echo the focus on Asia
uttered by the Obama administration’s “Pivot to Asia”4 slogan in 2010
and the dangerous Trans-Pacific Partnership drafted in 2015, and as of the
end of 2016 clearly never going into effect.

Questions of Positionality
I present Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Michelle Dizon
as postcolonial artists who have worked outside the strict boundaries of
nationality and ethnicity, thereby avoiding being situated in any of those
categories through their unique ways of crossing genres and contaminat-
ing languages, poetic forms and other media of choice. While questioning
the persistence of national labels applied to female artists with diasporic
 INTRODUCTION: VISUALITY, GENDER AND ASIAN AMERICA 17

backgrounds, I also discuss the work of Hung Liu, an accomplished

Chinese painter who resided in the San Francisco Bay Area, yet is widely
recognized in China as well. Liu presents an interesting tension, pointing
to discontinuities between the notion of Asian Americanness and the more
frequently acknowledged Sinocentrism today.
In my cultural critique of the art work at hand and its context of pro-
duction, I argue that the positions taken by the artists presented here,
including those of the younger generation, tend to resist fixed identities
and embrace autonomous spaces. In this part of the argument, I inter-
twine gender and postcolonial criticisms of globalization. As argued by
Arjun Appadurai and many others, globalization imposes on to scholars
the question of coevality, disrupting once and for all the dualism of the
future-oriented West vs. the traditional rest of the world, which is always
seen as traditional and described in the past tense. I apply such critique
to art institutions like the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, which
persists in presenting shows that reproduce an imaginary orientalized
Asian past, moving away from contemporaneity and safely downplaying
the key theme of contamination, despite contamination being reflected
in Asian American art.

Organization of the Chapters

The book is organized into six chapters. This first introduces the overarch-
ing themes, theories and research tools, while the remaining chapters
develop chronologically from the 1970s to the 2000s, framing the work of
specific artists in the cultural and political milieu of California.
In Chap. 2, I focus on the work of first-generation Chinese American
artist Nancy Hom, active in political circles in the Bay Area since the
1970s. Drawing on her interviews, I explore the way gender and politics
have shaped her identification with Asian Americanness both as an emerg-
ing political concept and as a tool for building community.
In Chap. 3, I look at the 1980s and early 1990s, especially the shift to
video and experimental filmmaking, discussing the work of Theresa
Hak-Kyung Cha and Trinh T. Minh-ha. I argue that these artists, who
have a uniquely transnational sensibility, do not fit neatly into a concept
of feminist art, nor do they present themselves as simply Asian American.
Rather, their work engages in political and poetic processes of “becom-
ing” that short-circuit localism and cosmopolitanism through an onto-
logical shift. Drawing from feminist theory, and specifically Elaine Kim’s
18 L. FANTONE

writings, I offer the analogy of “border writing” (a term first coined by

Gloria Anzaldúa) as it reconfigures any sense of stable identity, memory
or fixed language. This allows for the emergence of intervals, breaks and
fragments in poetics that act as reflections of multiple cultural, historical
and biographical ruptures.
The fourth chapter covers the late 1990s by focusing on Flo Oy Wong
and Cynthia Tom, and in particular the need for community building and
feminist support among Asian American artists. Their artwork is con-
nected to a turn in cultural politics and the prevalence of identity dis-
courses. The chapter then develops an analysis of the Asian American
Women Artists Association (AAWAA) founded in San Francisco in the
1980s. By interviewing its core members, Nancy Hom, Betty Kano and
Cynthia Tom, I examine how the association promoted solidarity and
strength among artists by using the term Asian American, reviving its con-
nection to 1970s politics of creative assertion of a community’s visibility. I
particularly give space to Flo Oy Wong, as a founding member of AAWAA,
to talk about the necessity to have a gendered and ethnicity-based artists’
association. What do AAWAA artists share? What is the interplay of ethnic-
ity and gender in Oy Wong’s work? What kinds of feminist negotiations
between the personal, on the one hand, and the ethnic, immigrant iden-
tity, on the other, underlie her creative processes?
This chapter also inevitably engages with the historical trajectory of
“Asian American” as a term moving from counter-hegemonic space into a
wide circulation in multicultural policies, which I consider in relation to a
current terminology crisis. I look at two generations of artists and the
evolution of the term Asian American as they use it, asking in my inter-
views what it means for them. By examining their answers, I connect them
to a key paradox explored by various cultural critics in the 1990s; that
once a hyphenated identity becomes a commonly used label, it loses its
potential to destabilize hegemony. Discourses of identity and resistance
have crumbled since the 1990s in a non-dialectical reconfiguration of
power and cultural hegemony that is still with us today.
Chapter 5 points to a shift from Asian Americanness to global, transna-
tional issues in the 2000s. I analyze the policies of local art institutions
and the self-positioning of Chinese artist Hung Liu, who has been living
in California for decades. I argue that her need to reference her national
identity and roots in presenting the subject of her art is connected to a
turn in cultural politics and the prevalence of Chinese national discourses.
I develop here my denunciation of the current transnational promotion
 INTRODUCTION: VISUALITY, GENDER AND ASIAN AMERICA 19

of Chinese art, connecting it to a critique of Eurocentrism, fueling the

neo-­orientalist appetites reflected by recent California exhibits. I critique
specific California art museums for their curatorial choices, as having a
silent effect of marginalizing diasporic artists in the United States, as well
as involuntarily erasing historical connections and continuities across the
Pacific Rim, all the while reassuring Western audiences of their cosmo-
politanism. Here is where the high-art cosmopolitan discourse, predi-
cated upon the celebration of California’s multiple cultures and identities,
clashes with the rejection of the Asian female artist, reduced too often to
an immigrant distant other, despite her local situatedness in contemporary
California. I frame Liu’s positions as strategic essentialism, allowing her to
meet the expectations of Americans regarding what female and Asian
artists are supposed to offer to the general public while telling stories of
Asian America.
The sixth chapter draws conclusions from all the interviews and critical
analysis carried out throughout the previous chapters, demonstrating the
contemporary low-visibility of Asian Americanness5 in contrast with high-­
profile contemporary East Asian art, especially Chinese. Here my analysis
points to a shift from Asian Americanness to global, transnational issues in
the 2000s. I focus on the emerging Asian American artist from California,
Michelle Dizon, who positions her work in global circuits and embraces a
postcolonial poetics outside of strictly national frames, all while maintain-
ing a strong, decolonial political valence to her work with critiques of
commodification and globalization.
In the book’s Conclusions, I return to my initial question of the visibility
of Chinese artists, and the invisibilization of Asian diasporic female artists in
America. I discuss the use of Asian American identity, when embraced by the
artists and critics as a label, in terms of a double-edged sword. On one side,
we see its ghettoizing limits and, on the other, a much-needed critique of
current hegemonic Sinocentrism. Referencing the work of the artists ana-
lyzed in Chap. 3, I argue that the tension between cosmopolitanism and a
strong identity-based communitarianism permeating artistic discourses can
be undone by embracing a transnational, postcolonial, feminist approach in
cultural policies in contemporary California. My critique of the current
transnational promotion of Chinese art is connected to a critique of
Eurocentrism as it fuels orientalist appetites reflected by recent California
exhibits. I register the contradictions and hierarchies developing between
cosmopolitanism and diversity, localism and exoticism, and elaborate the dis-
cussion by engaging with both Pheng Cheah’s critique of cosmopolitanism
20 L. FANTONE

(Cheah and Robbins 1998) and Kobena Mercer’s conception of c­ osmopolitan

modernism. In contemporary America, it would be reasonable to assume
that cultural institutions would reflect this diversity by engaging diverse
audiences. Instead, there is a certain stabilized absence of interest for Asian
American artists and gender minorities in Californian art institutions. In
considering this phenomenon, I question the implications of an absence of
interest on the part of contemporary American audiences, and even artists
themselves, shadowed by the not-so-new fear of, and even desire for, China,
currently tied to globalization and private investments. My interest in the
positioning and labeling of East Asian vs. Asian American artists leads me to
use Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality to question classism,
Eurocentrism and elitism in the art world as underlying the silent rejection
of Asian American visual diasporas.
Ultimately, the larger political statement of this book is that California
is becoming decentered by Asia in the same way that American culture and
society have been decentered by imperial relations with Asia by way of
Asian American communities’ presence in the United States, dating back
to the nineteenth century. All these dimensions are interestingly reflected
in the cultural and artistic sensibilities of the artists presented here as they
embrace pan-Asian categories, move through strategic essentialism, and
open an in-between space that is transnational and rooted at the same time.
What follows in the next chapters may be described as a map, a polycen-
tric description of how a group of Asian American artists translate their
politics, their bodies, and complex biographic and aesthetic trajectories
into their artwork, against and with what Machida would term “communi-
ties of imagination” (at times feminist, at others Asian American, Chinese
or global). I conclude that the AAWAA plays a crucial part in building a
local, feminist community based in mutual support, and rooted in pan-­
Asianism, but also acts locally in promoting visibility that is attached to
notions of multiculturalism and diversity in San Francisco. Despite the
artists’ need for community, the word itself often works against them,
again relegating them to marginality or invisibility, precisely because of the
larger frame in which “community” has come to be devalued in art as
purely local and inevitably passé. Since the 1970s, the macro-social and
economic shifts of neoliberalism and globalization have shaped a general
devaluing of local community to the advantage of cosmopolitan projects,
artists and elite spectators. In this light, the term “Asian-American com-
munity” becomes a necessary combination of words used to gain legitimacy,
 INTRODUCTION: VISUALITY, GENDER AND ASIAN AMERICA 21

but at the same time, this “community” is only supplemental and subordin­
ated to the prime visibility of Chinese—and some East Asian—arts. Such
discourse is still reflected in some of the stale rhetoric of a few Californian
art institutions. In these contexts, Asian female artists are neither consid-
ered central nor nurtured by the main institutional art spaces. They are
rather invited to sit at the far corner of the table as representative of a com-
munity that cannot realistically be excluded, but is only really present
when colored bodies are needed to add flavor to the canon or high-profile,
“cosmopolitan” events. The predominant discourse created by curators
and critics still traps these artists in the past, tending to hide their contri-
butions to California’s culture in the present, or, in a twisted irony, caging
them behind the golden bars of authenticity by asking them to fit into
narrow conceptions of Chineseness or Asian femininity. I ground my con-
clusions in relation to Machida’s concept of a “community of cultural
imagination” for Asian American art. Such a vision remains far from com-
mon, in the context of neo-orientalism. I also discuss how the combina-
tion of discourses on “post-raciality” and Sinocentrism diminish the
visibility of female artists of the Asian diaspora.
Many questions remain unanswered in respect to the contemporary
Sinocentrism and Eurocentrism of art’s elites in San Francisco, and ques-
tions about the lack of collectors of Asian American art, too, deserve to be
addressed, in light of the massive influx of Asian investment in the Silicon
Valley area. This book offers voices, images, artworks and cultural policies
using postcolonial and feminist theories, aimed at restituting to Asian
American women artists a deserved place at the table: a dinner table at a
nice place, uniquely shaped by multiplicity and opacity, open to the future
of Asian Americanness, as expansive as AAWAA is and as welcoming as the
California Bay Area can be. A place of their own.

Notes
1. These are authors apparently belonging to different traditions, and yet con-
nected by their poetic feminism and by their biographies intertwined with
the francophone postcolonial contexts, such as Algeria and Vietnam.
2. I connected Cha’s work with the 1980s emergence of other women-of-
color writings on gender. Among many titles the list includes: Cherríe
Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s edited volume This Bridge Called My Back:
Radical Writings from Women of Color (1981), Sister Outsider by Audre
Lorde (1984), bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman (1981), Elaine Kim’s edited
volume Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian
American Women (1989).
22 L. FANTONE

3. Throughout the rest of the book I am going to use the word “orientalism”
and the adjective “orientalist” in lower case, from now on, and throughout
my book. It should already be clear that I do not refer to the Orientalist
painters nor do I consider the Orient a valid category of analysis. I wish to
signal here that I maintain a critical view while still needing to use the term
to point at such a discourse that still has currency, as well as its related schol-
arship. I have added “neo-orientalism” to further develop Edward Said’s
critique, and adapt it to the present fear of “the rise” of China.
4. Since 2010, the Obama administration had adopted a policy of rebalancing
the United States toward Asia, as detailed in 2012 its military, economic
decisions and trade, human rights, and diplomatic initiatives. Barack Obama
stated that the United States will play a leadership role in Asia for many years
to come, but this slogan may very well be a new label for old policies aimed
at furthering the influence of the United States in Asia. In fact, many schol-
ars have argued that since World War II the major focus of United States
foreign policy has been Asia. In this context, I only wish to underline the
resonance between such focus, and the US cultural policies effecting circula-
tion of art across the Pacific.
5. My use of “Asian American” is consciously loose, as my writings reflect on
how Asian Americanness is not a fixed category, but the result of historically
situated and strategic uses, constantly renegotiated. I do not intend to treat
the category of Asian Americanness as static and monolithic, but to signal
more clearly its usefulness to evade national and ethnic labels and, by virtue
of its political fluidity, its proximity to the queer and postcolonial theory on
which I found my research.

References
Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900–1970. Fine Arts Museums
of San Francisco, de Young Museum, 2008–9. Exhibition brochure.
Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Cheah, Pheng, and Bruce Robbins, eds. 1998. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling
Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cornell, Daniel, and Mark Dean Johnson, eds. 2008. Asian/American/Modern
Art: Shifting Currents, 1900–1970. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Djebar, Assia. 1992. Women of Algiers in their Apartment. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia. (original edition, Paris: Des femmes, 1980).
Fanon, Frantz. [1967] 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.
Feng, Peter X. 2002. Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Garcia, Roger, ed. 2001. Out of the Shadows: Asians in American Cinema. Milan/
New York: Olivares.
 INTRODUCTION: VISUALITY, GENDER AND ASIAN AMERICA 23

Higa, Karin. 2002. What Is an Asian American Woman Artist? In Art/Women/

California, 1950–2000: Parallels and Intersections, ed. Diana Burgess Fuller
and Daniela Salvioni, 81–94. Berkeley: University of California Press.
hooks, bell. 1981. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South
End Press.
Kim, Elaine, ed. 1989. Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and About
Asian American Women. Boston: Beacon Press.
Kim, Elaine H., Margo Machida, and Sharon Mizota. 2003. Fresh Talk, Daring
Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Koshy, Susan. 2004. Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg: Crossing
Press.
Lowe, Lisa. 1996. Immigrant Acts. Durham: Duke University Press.
Machida, Margo. 2008. Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists
and the Social Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press.
Marchetti, Gina. 1993. Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex and Discursive
Strategies in Hollywood Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mercer, Kobena. 2005. Cosmopolitan Modernisms. London: Institute of
International Visual Arts.
Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back:
Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table, Women of
Color Press.
One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now. University of California, Berkeley
Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, 2007. Exhibition brochure.
Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Shi, Shumei. 2007. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the
Pacific. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Shohat, Ella Habiba, ed. 1998. Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a
Transnational Age. Cambridge/New York: MIT Press/New Museum of
Contemporary Art.
Trinh, T. Minh-ha. 1989. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and
Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
———. 1992. Framer Framed. New York: Routledge.
———. 2001. The Fourth Dimension. New York: Women Make Movies. DVD,
87 min.
Zhang, Xu Dong. 1997. Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever,
Avant-garde Fiction, and New Chinese Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press.
 CHAPTER 2

Asian American Art for the People

ART
all black against white, white sheer light shapes a female face out of darkness.
diagonal and horizontal lines
contrasted lights.
the traits of the woman’s face become signs,
The Asian invisible workers are in the light of power.
They run the show.
Everyone knows that, but who ever thought of their faces?
she is smiling and looking up
powerfully.
Confident she can, with many other working women shut the country down.
A classic style that did not age
I wish I could have been there to see them perform.
Nancy Hom poet and visual artist, with her multiplicity and lightness
left a trace of that event,
its subject affirmation resonating across the decades
red strength reverberating

Introduction
This chapter describes the work of Nancy Hom, a female Chinese-­
American artist active in the 1970s, who produced images of empower-
ment and political resistance, especially in response to American imperialism

© The Author(s) 2018 25

L. Fantone, Local Invisibility, Postcolonial Feminisms,
Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50670-2_2
26 L. FANTONE

Fig. 2.1 Working Women, poster by Nancy Hom

in Vietnam, Korea and elsewhere in Asia. The chapter analyzes the

positioning of this female as a diasporic artist, registering an initial conver-
gence around Asian American identity and Third Worldism, then a gradual
distancing from it to move towards personal affirmations of gender and
Buddhism in her art.
Tracing the genealogy of Hom’s work would not be possible without
introducing a discussion of Asian American identity, and the 1970s social
movement connected to it, as a highly creative space reacting to racism, as well
as the fragmentation and racialization of such communities. This chapter reg-
isters the oscillation between the collective and the personal, the artistic aspira-
tions and the use of art strictly as a political tool, and, most importantly, the
sense of urgency of solidarity across Asians living at the margins of American
society. Nancy Hom’s interview, the backbone of this chapter, describes viv-
idly how social movements did not embrace separate national identities, but
rather attempted to create a fluid yet strong sense of agency and solidarity
among Asians in the US cultural arena. Her artistic trajectory reflects a com-
plex positioning path shaped by an initial convergence around Asian American
identity, deeply connected to Third Worldism, and lingering in the questions
of self and other, self-expression and serving the cause.
I shall start by introducing the context in which I met Nancy Hom and
scheduled the precious interview that I present here. When I arrived in
California to research Asian American art in the Bay Area, many scholars
 ASIAN AMERICAN ART FOR THE PEOPLE 27

and community members immediately mentioned the name of Nancy

Hom (Moira Roth pointed me to the Asian American Women’s Artists
Association). I was introduced to Hom at SOMArts cultural center, and
was struck by her unpretentiousness. Before meeting and interviewing
her, I had read her name in Lucy Lippard’s book Mixed Blessings, a pio-
neering survey of multiculturalism and American art.
Hom appears in a couple of pages, with images and a poem that hinted
at the fact that she was more than a graphic artist, a multiplicity I am par-
ticularly interested in exploring here. A quote from Nancy’s poem
“Drinking Tea with Both Hands” was printed in Lippard’s volume in
bold, at the right margin, squeezed between Frank Chin’s1 statement on
Asian Americans and a discussion of Margo Machida’s work in relation to
minority discourse, loss of culture, identity, language and the reduction to
stereotypes.

I drink tea with both hands

boil a chicken on holidays
I celebrate traditions
dancing wildly
[…]
In me echoes the cries of ancestors
screams of Westerners
blending in dissonance
and harmony.
I want to forget it all
This curse called identity
I want to be far out
Paint dreams in strange colors
Write crazy poetry
Only the chosen can understand
But it’s not so simple
I still drink tea
with both hands. (Hom 1977)

Hom’s work immediately caught my attention for its multiple layers

and tensions, clearly stretching between politics and poetry, her ethereal
dancing, her hard work printing posters, her rooting Chinese identity and
boundless experimentation. In her words, Hom expressed her immigrant
28 L. FANTONE

daughter’s loyalties and rebellion strategies, executed by creatively moving

across dissonant cultures and social values, shaped by gender, family roles
and class. As always, the personal is political, and Hom’s writings and
interviews clearly show a deep self-reflectiveness, not fully describable by
the classic feminist slogan, but by the deep connective work she carried
out to weave the two in a continuum with her life, with her politics and
her art, embracing the contradictory places where these forces lead her.
I drink tea with both hands
boil a chicken on holidays
I celebrate old traditions
dancing wildly (Hom 1977)

The contrast between boiling chicken and dancing wildly are brought
together by Hom so elegantly and proudly, a Toisanese immigrant woman
and a young artist speaking in the same poem. In this lies the power of her
work, breaking from the limiting discourses of the poor, hardwork-
ing, immigrant Asian woman, dedicated to family and traditions, that per-
meates so much of American culture in its imperative to reduce its
immigrants to a few, useful stereotyped characteristics to go by when
encountering them in everyday life.

There’s a part of me where I embrace all the parts of my life, and my back-
grounds. There’s a hippy part of me. There’s a beat part of me. There’s a
mother, older enough to have gone through a lot of different cultural influ-
ences… you know, all that stuff, if you embrace it all, is very freeing, but it
is also very difficult to do that without breaking away from some contradic-
tions, family, finances, languages.

Hom takes these contradictions she experiences and gives them to the
audience, in a dry, ironic verse. In other writings, she explicitly addresses
the awkward silences about her sexual life with her mother, the increasing
gaps between her and her family, typical of any college-bound young
woman, except heightened in her perception by her respect and filial duty
toward her older female relatives.

The old ladies from Toisan didn’t know, couldn’t have known that this dutiful
daughter sitting silently beside her mother was the same person sprawled on
the floor of somebody’s dorm at the Pratt Institute the night before… listen-
ing to the Beatles’s She’s So Heavy. (Hom, in Louie and Omatsu 2001, p. 102)
 ASIAN AMERICAN ART FOR THE PEOPLE 29

I am taken by the reference to the legendary album Abbey Road, recorded

in 1969, before I was born.2 The refrain “I want you… I want you so
baaaahaad,” makes me simultaneously think of my own college year, the
schizophrenic roles of “straight A student” by day vs. bad girl at night,
sweet smiles and silences offered to my family, hiding my sexual life to
them. However, Hom’s story has an extra patina of glamour: New York
City, Hell’s Angels and the 1960s! It makes me aware of what a nostalgic
I am of the 1960s and 1970s (as if it was not obvious enough by the topic
of this book), partly because of my passion for social change and feminist
movements, which made me develop a fetish for black-and-white images
of the 1960s: women with long hair and low-cut jeans, doing something
artistic, yelling into loudspeakers, immersed in oceanic crowds, concerts,
facing riots, in short, all the iconic elements of rebellion and intensity that
my 1990s college years did not have.
A woman like the black-and-white figure printed by Hom, opening this
chapter:

There were so many things the old ladies didn’t know about me;
… this young Chinese immigrant was Toisanese enough to know you
never visit without bringing oranges; this is the same person who wrapped
toilet paper around an armature for her art final and drank beer in question-
able Bed-Sty bars with men with Hell’s Angels Jackets. … I was an artist,
I drew the wind and clouds; I followed the patters of light as it lit the
trees and buildings; I wrote odes to the lily child. (Hom, in Louie and
Omatsu 2001, p. 102)

In the last sentence Hom expresses a core desire, a deeply felt need that
I heard from many other Asian American artists. Being an artist meant for
her, and many others, finding a space to escape family obligations, and
the social and ethical pressures of dutiful daughters, and, in contrast,
allowing for the need to use creativity as a space of resistance to such pres-
sures. Hom, as most artists of that generation, desired to be rebellious
but not just in an individualized manner. She sought to simultaneously
channel art and creativity into a political resistance against being minori-
tized in American society. The key shift here is art making for social
change in general terms—to art making for the Asian American emerging
community, which meant creating an artist community, and forging a
specifically Asian American artist community. Hom was not the only artist
thinking along these lines, as such acrobatic bridging of activism,
education and self-education about political issues and creativity was a
30 L. FANTONE

widespread project, across ethnicities and locations: in major urban cen-

ters across the US many Asian Media Collectives emerged in those years
in the 1960s3 (see Alexandra Chang 2009), with names that signaled a
racial/ethnic self-identification, as well as radical revolutionary language
and forms (such as the 217 collective, the Japantown Art and Media
Collective in San Francisco). The story goes that Hom began her lifelong
engagement with “cultural activism in the early 1970s.”
The moment when her artistic life became clearly political was a concert
at Pratt Institute, where as a student she heard songs by Chris Iijima and
Nobuko Miyamoto,4 Japanese American folk musicians using music to
affirm the stories of the invisible Asian immigrants, day laborers, people
like her family members (Ishizuka 2016).

They sang things that resonated with me, songs of garment workers and
railroad builders, people like my parents.
There was some kind of bing moment that went off in me.
Through the singers, members of the Asian American Media Collective,
me, Tomie Arai and a few other women became active and conscious. Tomie
then joined the Basement Workshop, a grassroots art organization in
New York. (Hom in Machida et al. 2008, p. 18)

As Hom moved away from the NY Chinatown where she grew up, and
engaged fully in her political activism (Hom, in Louie and Omatsu 2001,
p. 104) she kept contrasting her family and home-cooked food with her
explorations of the city with her peers, also Asian artists and radicals.

We hang out in the streets, a wine glass in our hand, talk of Asian American
themes, eating mai fon at 3 o’clock in the morning.
… My mother made mai fon but it did not taste as good as when I went
out with my friends at the 217 Collective. Mother’s mai fon had seasonings
from 4000 years of righteous upbringing, served on Sundays to the old
ladies that came by to visit, and reminiscence about China. (Hom 1971,
unpublished diary)

The theme of food is recurring in much of migrant female literature,

where it is often used to connect the mother figure, the motherland and
tradition carried out matrilinearly. This holds true for Hom’s poems and
prose. In this case, her pleasure in eating traditional food with young,
rebellious friends in New York serves the purpose of a sort of liberatory
connecting and distancing from her roots.
 ASIAN AMERICAN ART FOR THE PEOPLE 31

Other sections of her diary do hint at continuity and generational breaks,

political breaks, lifestyle shifts that marked the 1960s’ Asian American
movement participants as radically different from their parents, in their
generational and political forging the very category of Asian Americanness.
Asian Americans across the vast national distances, Japanese, Filipino or
Chinese, were forging a political, generational, and pan-ethnic bond, fueled
by friendship, food and countercultural lifestyle (wine glass in our hands,
talking about Asian American themes, mai fon at three in morning). Here
is also where the classic 1960s stories of the generational break take on a
different dimension, if looked at across races, ethnic minorities, natives
and immigrants. This is an important fact to consider, given how it is often
memorialized with little emphasis on its internal diversity. The diary entry
poses to me questions of how historical time affects the cultural roots of an
artist and her demographic background.
For Hom it was not just a matter of generational rebellion, as much as
a matter of navigating multiple misunderstandings: her form of political
engagement was simply irrelevant for her parents. Her identity was invisi-
ble for the American mainstream. Her artistic aspirations were initially
stunted because of her gender and immigrant roots. All these aspects con-
tributed to the paradoxical position in which she found herself: her
involvement in Asian American activism of the 1960s, a peak moment of
ethnic mobilization, and her embracing a new rebellious lifestyle, was
sparked by the very ideal of immigrant justice, of granting rights and visi-
bility to her own ethnic group, her own Chinese community and family
members.

My parents and the old ladies chuckled at my lifestyle … wearing beads and
headbands made of men’s ties.
I did not understand why they disapproved; What I was doing was for
them: the Health Fair, the Food Fair, the protests, the films. The movement
was for their benefit; yet all they saw was the strange clothes and demonstra-
tors dragged by police on TV. (Hom, in Louie and Omatsu 2001, p. 102)

A tragic contrast between the goals and the forms of mobilization, in this
difficult space, Hom and many Asian American activists found strength
and a strong determination to change American society and vindicate
the Chinese community’s lack of visibility, material poverty and general
32 L. FANTONE

social neglect. Hom writes, in her poem “Drinking Tea with Both
Hands” (written in 1977),
In me echoes the cries of ancestor
screams of Westerners
blending in dissonance
and harmony (Hom in Lippard, 1990)

Finding a space to be an activist from her generation and to connect

with other Asian American artists and activists was hard, and attempts
were divided by class and political differences. Hom describes a tension
inside of her fancy building in the Upper East Side—where privileged
students talked about the proletariat. In these circles, she saw too much
politics, little self-reflexivity, no connection with the community and no
creativity. In 1974, Hom moved to San Francisco with photographer Bob
Hsiang, who would later become her husband.

In New York I joined [the] basement workshop briefly, but not for long...
soon after I left to California. I left because, well, for one thing, my hus-
band, well, (boyfriend at the time)5 was laid off and I had a 9 to 5 job. I
don’t think I was ever made for a 9 to 5 job. It was a commercial publishing
company, but I felt like I wanted to do more. And it took a lot of my hours.
So, I really wanted to really find a place where I could earn some money, but
also I could devote a lot more time to community issues and it seemed like
California was more suited that way than New York. New York was so
expensive.

Moving to San Francisco made it all come together, politically and cre-
atively, when Hom found the group who started the Kearny Street
Workshop.

I was fresh out of college. I had already joined some groups in New York.
I wanted something that was not just your usual gallery art scene, career-
type thing. I wanted to do something for the community, too. And I had
heard about the San Francisco housing battle for I-Hotel,6 even in New York.
So literally, we drove across the country and landed at the I-Hotel, and I saw
this storefront, and I said, oh, it seems like just the place for me. That’s how
I got started here.

We came to California in 1974. That’s two years after the workshop was
already started. So, at that time Jim Dong was the main driver as an artistic
direction. They had all those community workshops and summer programs
 ASIAN AMERICAN ART FOR THE PEOPLE 33

for the youth, many organized by Harvey Dong, which included non-art
activities like camping and sewing and leather craft. It had a whole bunch of
arts and crafts activities plus social activities.
So, the real original intent of Kearny Street Workshop wasn’t specifically
artistic.
Which is very interesting now because it [is] all artistic focus, but then
Jim was the only visual artist. He did murals and he did silk screens because
of his connection with the Chicano movement, which was strong in San
Francisco at the time. Their murals were happening in the Mission, and
poster art. A few months later on, some people like Jack Wu and Leland
Wong, also embraced that silkscreen medium and popular themes for
posters.

In her recent book Serving the People, Making Asian America in the Long
Sixties,7 art historian Karen Ishizuka develops an argument about poster
art as a form that democratized the aesthetics and distribution of what was
considered “art” (2016, p. 134).8 Ishizuka quotes Julianne Gavino,
explaining that the KSW’s mission was conveyed fully in the aesthetics of
the posters themselves and their geographic circulation. “By their place-
ment in selected communities, the posters communicated a subtextual
message: Asian American ethnic communities are to be valued and made
visible in society” (ibid., p. 135).
Similarly, Berkeley librarian and political posters’ collector Lincoln
Cushing, eloquently speaking about the semiotic power of poster art in
the 1960s and 1970s, argues that posters were the most iconic art form
of the 1960s: these fragile documents were capable of transmitting such
abstract concerts as “solidarity,” “sisterhood” and “peace,” all over the
world.
Art and politics were inextricably connected for Hom, so at the time
she also started to use the silkscreen because many posters and flyers for
demonstrations were designed with silkscreen. Leland Wong is another
legendary San Franciscan, Chinese American artist who combined tradi-
tional artistic skills with political themes in his work, always with humor
and an accessible pop-lightness. Hom became an active member for thirty
years, eventually becoming the executive director of the Kearny Street
Workshop from 1995 to 2003, after Jim Dong’s twenty-year run (Fig. 2.2).
In her interview, Hom retraces the origins of the Kearny Street Workshop
(KWS):
34 L. FANTONE

Fig. 2.2 Nancy Hom and filmmaker Loni Ding at Kearny Street Workshop,
photo taken by Bob Hsiang

Kearny Street Workshop was started by two men Jim Dong and Mike Chin,
and Lora Jo Foo,9 the only woman, in 1972.
It was a little difficult initially because there weren’t many women there.
In fact, hardly any and none with the artistic vision that Jim was holding
himself. I arrived in San Francisco in 1974, and I wanted to do art.
Everything was done in those times like a collective, so even if you were the
artist, everybody else chipped in and helped you produce your mural or your
poster or whatever and hardly anyone signed their names even, which is very
hard for archivist[s] now, although we recognize each other[’s] styles. …
Jim Dong went to school at SF State and he was a very versatile artist,
very prominent here for his focus on Chinese American community and life
stories. Mike Chin is now a filmmaker, but before he was interested in silk-
screen, they wanted to do something with their art and also to give back to
the community. So, when the three of us got together it seemed like a natural
fit to do something in Chinatown, but not just in Chinatown, inside the
International Hotel.
… And the struggle there started in 1968, so by the time they graduated
that struggle was already brewing. And they happen[ed] to have a nice,
cheap storefront, [with] which they thought they could offer classes to the
community.
 ASIAN AMERICAN ART FOR THE PEOPLE 35

Hom immediately felt the relevance of the KSW art collective, being
located in the heart of two ethnic enclaves; such a location was a greatly
energizing political element, in the urban dense space between Manilatown
and today’s Chinatown:

Around the corner from the I-Hotel, we had a storefront, for community
the Asian Community Center, and then around the corner was Jackson
Street Gallery. It was a huge space because our workshop space was good
enough for silkscreen workshop, ceramics, a real workshop place, but there
was no exposition space. When we got the gallery, we had twice as much
space as that. We had exhibition space, a little stage area, we had a whole
other space on the other side, offices in front and upstairs, a luxurious space.
Jackson Street meant we could have performances, classes every night, exhi-
bitions, meetings going on, and that was a very exciting time for us and all
kinds of artists came through because you could have art and photography
shows. Ethnic artists came from different parts of the country, too. This
made it different from a local group working only for their own local com-
munity; different ideas would emerge [from] these rich exchanges.

The epic story of the I-Hotel, which cannot be summarized here,10 inter-
sects with Hom’s work and cultural activism in deep ways, especially in
connecting with other Chinese American artists.

During that time politics was our daily bread, from 1974, the I-Hotel
tenants got evicted in 1977, so those were crucial three years building up
momentum for the big showdown and so a lot of our activities were printing
flyers, posters in support of events revolving around the I-Hotel struggle
and a lot [of] expositions. The other major issue [was] of Angel Island, in 1976.
At that point we were also approached by Paul Kagawa11 who wanted to save
the immigration station from being torn down, so calling attention to this
place and the history of Asian detention behind it. And then, eventually, it
wasn’t torn down, and the new Kearny Street actually did a major show with
Flo (Oy Wong) on the same topic. …
Eventually, Jim (Dong) and I hooked up as artistic buddies, and did
many printing projects together, and we opened up Jackson Street Gallery.
That meant that we had an exposition space and then all of these artists
came gradually together: poets, performers, photographers.

Hom recalls how Jim Dong and Leland Wong worked incessantly as silk-
screen artists to create posters reflecting the community’s needs. What made
a big impression on her was when she saw them making images of garment
workers, Asian women, just like her mother. She was clearly attracted to the
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4 Fig. 5

A Light-Weight, Two-Horsepower Motor Installed in a Stanch 18-Foot

Canoe will Increase the Range and Utility of Such a Craft; the
Construction Shown Is Simple and within the Capabilities of a Careful
Novice of Fair Mechanical Skill. A View of the Stern from Above is Shown
in Fig. 1. The Engine is Shown Mounted on the Engine Bed, and near the
Stern the Shaft Block is Shown. A Partial Sectional View is Shown in Fig.
2. The Relation of the Engine and Bed, Shaft and Fittings, Shaft Block,
Shaft Log, and Rudder are Shown. The Construction Diagram, Fig. 3, is
Described in Detail in the Text. A Larger-Scale View and a Section of the
Shaft Block are Indicated in Fig. 4, and Fig. 5 Illustrates the Engine Bed
with Dimensions and Fastening Holes

A detail of the shaft bearing R is shown in Fig. 4. The hole to

receive the shaft must be bored accurately, and the use of the
template, as with the boring of the shaft log, is advisable. Flanged
metal bearings are provided to take up the wear in the bearing block.
The method of fastening the block, as shown in the detail view,
insures a rigid bearing with a minimum of holes through the bottom
of the canoe. A U-bolt, T, binds the double angle brace U and the
block firmly to the keel. The angles of the brace are fixed into the
sides of the canoe with bolts, and a bolt at the stern end of the block
supports it further. The block should be placed so that it will bear on
three ribs and must be fitted to the curve of the canoe.
The rudder is made of sheet metal supported on a rod or pipe. Its
general dimensions are shown in Fig. 2. The fan of the rudder is
riveted to its supports and rests in a bearing strip of ¹⁄₄ by 1-in. strap
iron, which is shaped as a guard for the propeller. The upper bearing
of the rudder post is formed from a strip of iron, bolted to the stern,
and the upper guide bar, to which the ropes are attached, is cut from
an iron strip.
 The propeller is 8 in. in diameter, but may be installed of a size
suitable to the power, speed, and type of the motor used. The
stuffing box V, Fig. 2, the bearings for the bearing block R, the intake
strainer W, the exhaust outlet X, Fig. 1, and the shaft coupling Y are
all of manufactured types that may be purchased of marine-supply
houses.
The intake strainer W is placed in the bottom directly below the
pump Z. The exhaust outlet X is placed above the water line, and a
muffler should be installed to avoid noise from the exhaust
explosions. The exhaust may be conducted under water or to a point
near the stern. No indication is given for the placing of the gasoline
tank, the supply pipes, electrical-energy source, and wiring. The tank
may be placed in the stern of the canoe high enough to provide a
good flow. A magneto may be used to give current for the sparking
circuit, or batteries may be provided. They may be placed at any
point convenient, and should be incased in a waterproof container.
In assembling the parts care must be taken not to wrench the shaft
or other pieces out of line, and in general, it is well to fix
nonadjustable parts solidly when they are fitted into place. This
applies particularly to the engine bed and the shaft log. The bearing
block may be adjusted vertically by adding packing, or by reducing
the lower surface. The rudder and its fittings may be made in regular
course, but should not be fitted until the power unit and driving
mechanism is in place finally. The propeller may be protected from
possible injury by laying it aside until needed. All the openings in the
hull through which bolts or other fastenings are placed should be
packed with red lead or other waterproof packing. The working parts
and finished metal surfaces should be oiled or greased thoroughly as
the parts are assembled, and the unfinished metal parts painted with
red lead. This will protect them from moisture and aid in the smooth
operation of the mechanism.
 How to Make a Fluorescent Screen
Many experimenters have occasion to use a fluorescent screen,
particularly those interested in X-ray work. Such a device is quite
expensive if purchased, and may be made as follows:
Mix 1 oz. each of common salt, sodium tungstate, and calcium
chloride. Place the mixture in a crucible and heat it dull red in a coal
fire, for several hours. It will melt into a clear liquid, and should then
be removed and permitted to cool. The liquid will crystallize into a
hard glasslike mass. Break this out of the crucible and crush it into
small pieces. Put them into a jar of clear water. The sodium chloride
resulting from the chemical change by heating, will gradually
dissolve and the calcium tungstate will fall to the bottom in fine
crystals. Wash this precipitate until all trace of the salt disappears;
then pour the crystals upon a sheet of filter or blotting paper to dry.
After drying, place them in a mortar and grind them to a fine powder,
when they will be ready for use.
To make the screen proper, procure a piece of thin white
cardboard of the size desired. The calendered board known as
three-ply is satisfactory. Paint the cardboard on one side with a thick
solution of gum arabic in water, or better still, with celluloid dissolved
in amyl acetate. Permit the gum to become “tacky” before dusting
with the chemical. The latter process requires care, to produce an
even layer on the cardboard, and it is advisable to practice with
ordinary salt before attempting it on the cardboard for the screen.
The calcium tungstate should be placed in a dry jar, and a piece of
fine muslin fixed over the mouth of it. The chemical may be dusted
over the surface with this sieve jar.
Shake off the superfluous crystals and permit the screen to dry
thoroughly. Fasten a piece of mica, or sheet celluloid, over the
sensitized surface to prevent damage to it. Mount the sensitized
cardboard in a wooden frame of suitable size and arrange a hood
around its edges to cut out unnecessary light. The sensitive side of
the screen is, of course, held toward the observer when the
apparatus is used.—Contributed by Chester Keene, Hoboken, N. J.
 Preventing Wire Mesh from Rising between
Fence Posts
Fences which inclose pastures for hogs, or other smaller animals,
are usually stretched to give rigidity and strength. Often the
adjustment of the wire, after being put into place, causes it to rise
from the ground between the fence posts, permitting the animals to
escape. An effective method of holding the wire close to the ground
is shown in the sketch. A peg, notched near its upper end, is driven
into the ground so that the lower edge of the wire mesh is held fast in
the notch.—Contributed by O. B. Laurent, New Roads, La.
The Notched Stake Holds the
Wire Mesh Down between the
Posts Where It Has a Tendency
to Rise from the Ground
 Jig-Saw Table for Vise
Those who have occasional work to be done with a jig saw will find
the simple device shown in the sketch convenient. It provides a table
for sawing light work. By holding it in a vise, as shown, a rigid
support may be had. The table is made of a rectangular piece of ³⁄₄-
in. wood, 8 in. wide and 10 in. long. At one end, a strip, 1 in. square,
is attached for clamping in the vise. The other end is notched to
provide a place for the saw while in use.—Contributed by Victor A.
Rettich, New York, N. Y.

The Jig-Saw Table Provides a Rigid Support for Light Fretwork

 An Emergency Dark-Room Light

The traveling man who “lives in a suitcase” and at the same time
wishes to enjoy the pleasures of amateur photography sometimes
experiences difficulty in developing films in a hotel room. Soup plates
borrowed from the steward, or even the bowl pitcher and the ice-
water pitcher in the room, can be used for development, but it is very
hard to improvise a ruby lamp. My emergency lamp is a small vest-
pocket flash lamp over which two yellow envelopes, one inside of the
other, are slipped, as shown. The lower edges are cut perfectly
square and rest on the table, or shelf, in the closet, and all white light
is excluded. At night, the shades may be drawn, and a yellow-paper
sack may be tied around the electric light.—Contributed by J. L.
Pinkston, Granite Hill, Ga.
 An Ice Creeper

The illustration shows a one-piece ice creeper for the heel of a

boot or shoe. It is made from sheet steel with the arms bent up to
receive a strap for buckling it in place on the boot heel. The zigzag
cuts in the bottom part are turned down for engaging the ice.—
Contributed by Chas. S. Snell, Lewiston, Me.
¶In machine work a way must be provided for removing dowel pins
before they are driven in place.
 Waterproofing for Fish Lines

Dissolve ¹⁄₂ oz. of orange shellac in ¹⁄₂ pt. of alcohol, and add 1
teaspoonful of Venice turpentine, the same quantity of raw linseed
oil, and 2 oz. tincture of benzoin. Shake well, and set in a varnish
can in hot water.
Soak the coiled line in the varnish for two hours, then hang it up to
dry. Thin the varnish with alcohol, and repeat the dipping. When the
line is dry, rub it down well with a wool rag greased with tallow. Silk
lines treated in this manner are pliable, and the fibers of the silk are
so united by the varnish that the strength of the line is almost
doubled.
 Making Chest Lock More Secure

As a rule, ordinary chest locks cannot be relied upon, since almost

any kind of a similar key will unlock them. I found a good remedy by
taking out the pin on which the key fits, and making a new one twice
as long as the one removed, then drilling a hole in the key deep
enough to fit over the new pin. In case the pin extends too far, a
piece of wood block, with a hole in it to admit the key, can be
fastened over it to prevent bending the pin. No ordinary key will pass
on the pin far enough to turn the lock.—Contributed by Chas. G.
England, Washington, Pa.
 Driving Screws in Hard Wood
Keep the supply of screws in a box containing a small amount of
powdered soapstone. Shake the box occasionally, and the screws
will be dusted with the powder, which acts as a lubricant. This is a
much cleaner and more convenient method than the ordinary one of
rubbing each screw on a bar of soap before driving it in hard wood.
 Paddling Your Own Canoe
by
Stillman Taylor
PART I—
Kinds of Canoes

Theprose,
charm of the birchen canoe has long been sung in verse and
and while the bark that the Indian used has been
supplanted by a more perfect type of modern manufacture, the
popularity of this, the most graceful of water craft, has increased with
years, until today we find the canoe the choice of thousands of
recreation seekers who paddle about in park lakes and quiet
streams, or spend their vacations in cruising down rivers and other
attractive waterways—sometimes within the environs of towns and
villages, and again dipping paddles in the wilderness streams of the
far north. True, the modern canoe is a distinct product of the
twentieth century, and while it is so largely used at summer resorts, it
nevertheless retains all the good points of the old, while embodying
numerous improvements which fit it even better for wilderness travel
than the Indian model after which it was patterned. The noteworthy
increase in the number of canoeists in the past dozen years is good
evidence that this natty craft is fast coming into its own, and as more
and more outdoor men and women understand its possibilities and
limitations and become proficient in handling it, the long-rooted fear
and distrust with which the uninformed public regard the canoe, will
pass away. As a matter of fact, accidents ever follow in the wake of
ignorance and carelessness, and while there are very few expert
gunners injured by firearms, and still fewer experienced canoeists
drowned, there are numerous sad accidents constantly occurring to
the reckless and foolhardy, who do not know how to handle a
weapon, nor understand the first thing about paddling a canoe. Let
us consider then, the practical side of the subject, the choice of a
suitable canoe and the knack of handling it in a safe and efficient
manner.
If one would experience in full measure the many-sided charm of
paddling, he should get a good canoe. Unlike other and heavier
water craft, the canoe is a lightly balanced and responsive
conveyance, which may be cranky and dangerous, or safe and
stable, according to the model, the skill of the builder, and the
dexterity of the paddler. There are canoes and canoes, of varying
models and sizes, and constructed of many materials, and while all
may serve as a means of getting about in the water, the paddling
qualities include numerous little idiosyncrasies which serve to
differentiate canoes as well as men. In fact, this light and graceful
craft may be properly viewed as the highest type of boat building,
since it must be fashioned strong but light; it must be steady when
going light; capable of carrying comparatively heavy loads; draw little
water, and it must be honestly constructed of good material to stand
up under the hard usage which every canoe is subjected to, whether
used for summer paddling, or upon long hunting and shooting trips.
Three types of canoes are in common use by experienced
canoeists, the birch-bark, the all-wood, and the canvas-covered
cedar canoe. The birch-bark, by reason of its rougher workmanship,
is slow under the paddle, is easily injured, and it grows heavier and
more difficult to handle every time it is used. The all-wood canoe is
most expensive to buy, and though swift under the paddle, is too
easily injured and too difficult to repair for rough and ready use. The
cedar-planked canoe which is covered with filled and painted canvas
is for many reasons the best all-around craft-attractive enough for
park use, and stout enough for use in rapid water and for cruising in
northern lakes and rivers.

How to Select a Birch-Bark Canoe

The Indian-made birch-bark canoe costs about $1 a foot and is

fashioned of birch bark over an ash, or spruce, frame. The bark is
not nailed to the frame, but is sewed together with boiled spruce, or
tamarack, roots, split to a suitable size. To give the proper shape to
the canoe a double row of stakes are firmly planted in the ground
and the spruce frame is sprung between them. The bark is put on
inside out, and the work of sewing together is done while the bark is
fresh, or immediately after it is stripped from the tree. The seams are
afterward made water-tight by smearing well with spruce gum, which
hardens quickly and makes a fairly good joint. The Indian model is a
good one so far as the freeboard, width of beam, and flaring stems
are concerned, but the curved bottom makes it extremely cranky and
dangerous for the novice to handle. Be sure to see that the birch-
bark canoe is fashioned with a flat, straight bottom, which makes the
craft steadier and less inclined to veer about under the stroke of the
paddle. In an expert’s hands the round bottom will be found a
decided advantage, making it faster to paddle and more easily
turned and steered in swift and rough water. Many prefer the three-
piece bottom, but the bottom made of a single piece of bark is
stronger and less likely to open up and leak. All birch canoes will
warp and twist somewhat, and it is practically impossible to find one
that is straight and true. The birch-bark canoe has many limitations
and not a few weaknesses, but if one has the good luck to find a
good one, and treats it fairly, it will prove a safe and dry craft for
many hundreds of miles’ travel. Of course, one must carry a kettle of
pitch for making repairs, and be content to travel somewhat slower
than with modern canoes, but this may not be a disadvantage. Birch
canoes have no seats, as the Indian kneels when paddling, but a low
thwart, or seat, is easy to put in at the bow and stern, if one prefers
the white man’s paddling position.

All-Wood or Peterborough Canoe

This type of craft is much used in Canada along the St. Lawrence
River, and to a much less extent by American sportsmen, owing to
its higher cost, and its tendency to break and cause a leak. Of
course, the all-wood canoe is a good craft, but everything
considered, there can be no question in the minds of canoeists who
are acquainted with all types of canoes, that the all-cedar or
basswood craft is less dependable than the canvas-covered cedar
canoe. The Peterborough type—so called from a Canadian city of
this name where many wood canoes are made—with its relatively
low ends and straight sides with but little sheer and tumble home, is
the model commonly used by practically all manufacturers of the all-
wood canoe. While a boat of this kind can be, and often is, used in
rough-water lake paddling as well as in wilderness travel, the all-
wood canoe is better suited for club use, and in the wider and more
quiet-flowing streams and lakes.

The Best All-Around Craft, for Two Men and a Reasonable Amount of Camp
Duffle, Is a Canvas-Covered Cedar Canoe, 16 Feet Long, 32-Inch Beam, and
12 Inches Amidships, Weighing About 60 Pounds
 The Canvas-Covered Cedar Canoe

The canvas-covered cedar canoe, when rightly made of the best

material, is by all odds the best paddling craft afloat, being strong
and light, with a hull so smooth that it is swift to paddle, while the
mode of construction makes a very stiff craft, which will not warp or
twist out of shape. Moreover, it will stand a vast amount of hard
usage and abuse, while repairs are quickly and neatly done by the
stream side. In the making of a first-class canoe of this type, the ribs
are first steamed and then bent and fitted over a solid form; cedar
being used for the ribs and planking; spruce for the gunwales, and
white ash, or oak, for the stems and thwarts. In a canoe built
according to my instructions, each plank runs to the full length of the
craft and all are beveled and lapped together, thus making a
perfectly smooth and almost water-tight canoe, before the canvas is
cemented on its surface. The canvas is thoroughly waterproofed
before it is put on, then it is drawn tightly over the planking, and
several coats of filler and the final finish of paint are applied, after
which it is rubbed down.
The well-made canvas-covered canoe is, if properly designed, a
pretty good facsimile of the representative Indian model in that it
possesses all the good points of the birch-bark canoe, but is more
substantially constructed, of better and more durable material, and
more finely finished. In making the selection, it is necessary to pay a
fair price to obtain a good craft, and while various manufacturers
supply canoes of similar types at different prices, some of them are
so inferior that they will scarcely stand a season’s use. Of course,
the use to which a canoe is put will influence the selection. If the
craft is wanted for long service on hunting and fishing trips, a high-
grade canoe of plain finish is the logical choice. If the canoe is for
club use, a highly finished craft with mahogany trimmings may be
preferred. A canoe for occasional use on some quiet lake or small
stream may be selected from the cheaper kinds, which will, no
doubt, answer every purpose. However, most manufacturers list
what they call an “A” and a “B” grade. The “A” grade provides
selected-cedar ribs and planking; oak for gunwales, stems, thwarts
and seats selected from the finest material, and the finish the best
that can be procured, while the “B” grade is identical in model,
canvas and paint, but the material not quite so clear or free from
minor defects, though for all practical purposes it will render as much
service and give fully as much satisfaction as the first, or “A,” grade.
A little saving may be made by selecting the second-grade canoe,
having most of the money invested in the canoe and not so much in
the finer finishings. The ordinary construction provides for the
ordinary solid topwale, but the open gunwale is sometimes preferred,
because the openings make washing easy, all sand and dirt running
out freely between the wales. This construction detail is supplied by
most manufacturers, when specified, at a slight additional cost.